6 Must-Have Categories for Managing Marketing Content

Lead nurturing campaigns require a strong content base so you can provide buyers with offers that will move them through your sales funnel. Keeping that marketing content organized can be a challenge. To overcome it, the first thing you should do when launching into lead nurturing and marketing automation is create a marketing content assets list.

An assets list will help you organize your content so that you can:

See potential content gaps in your marketing sales funnel

Provide a central location for finding assets that may be in different places

Create visibility for assets that may be out of date

To ensure that your marketing content assets list can accomplish those three things listed above, there are six categories that should be used to label every piece of lead nurturing content:

Sales Funnel Level: One of the easiest ways to discover content gaps in your marketing sales funnel is to label your existing content as top, middle or bottom of the funnel. While you may not know for sure where it stands, you should make your best guess as to where it fits in your nurturing.

Type: Is the content an ebook or a video? Is it a worksheet or a checklist? You can diversify the offers you provide leads categorizing each piece of content with an appropriate content type.

Product/Service: If your company offers multiple products or services, there’s no need to have multiple content lists for each one. Simply add a category for the product on each related piece of content, and you can have one master document for all content.

Date Published: Often overlooked, this valuable category will help you find content that you need to update or retire. Even something as routine as a product brochure has a life span and you can coordinate regular updates to all you content if you know the date pieces were published. (Add a label for when you should update a document for bonus points.)

Available for Nurturing: A simple "yes" or "no" answer will do when you need to know if you can use a piece of content for nurturing. Even if you can’t use the content for lead nurturing right now, you should have that content in your assets list so that you can use it again in the future or find it in order to update.

Asset Location: Some assets may be uploaded online somewhere, on your site or a third-party site like YouTube or Slideshare. Others may be on a server or in your DropBox. Put the full URL or server location for an asset in any list you create so that you can quickly copy and paste the location into an address bar.

Once you’ve label each of the piece of content within the categories above, you can quickly reuse the assets when you need them or update the assets when they require it. Best of all, this big-picture view will help you determine where your gaps are, so you know when you need more top-, middle- or bottom-of-the-funnel content.